Head of School

Professor Shapiro in collaboration with other colleagues published the first paper on the ‘attentional blink’ phenomenon, which has attracted great interest on the part of many scientists. The original publication has been cited over 1000 times and approximately 500 reports on the same topic have followed from it. He employs a wide range of neuroscience approaches and tools in his ...

Professors

Professor of cognition and developmentDirector of Research for the School of Psychology

Ian Apperly is an experimental psychologist, and his main research interest is in “mindreading” – the ability to take other people’s perspectives. He is the author of a recent book entitled “Mindreaders: The cognitive basis of theory of mind”.

Professor in Criminological PsychologyHead of the Centre for Forensic and Criminological Psychology

Professor Anthony Beech is Head of the Centre for Forensic and Criminological Psychology at the University of Birmingham, UK. He has authored over 150 peer-reviewed articles, 40 book chapters and six books in the area of forensic science/criminal justice. In 2009 he received the Significant Achievement Award from the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers in Dallas, and the Senior ...

Professor Bowman applies the methods of Cognitive Neuroscience, especially EEG and Neural Modelling, to understanding a spectrum of Cognitive phenomena, including conscious perception, temporal attention and subliminal search. Much of his work focuses on verifying the simultaneous Type/ Serial Token theory of temporal attention and working memory encoding, which he developed with Brad ...

Professor Copello's research has led to major impacts on addiction treatment in the UK in recent years. He was Principal Investigator in the MRC funded UK Alcohol Treatment Trial, the largest trial of alcohol treatments conducted in the UK that informs effective and cost effective delivery of psychosocial interventions for alcohol problems. He led the development of a social and family ...

Dr Steven Luck is an expert on attention and working memory, both in typical individuals and in people with mental health conditions such as schizophrenia. He is also one of the world’s leading experts on the use of brain waves to study the human mind and brain.

Professor Miall has been studying sensory motor control for about 30 years, from his PhD in locusts, to crayfish, primates and for most of the 15 years, working on human motor control. He is particularly interested in the role of the cerebellum, in motor learning and in predictive control.

Chris Oliver is Professor of Neurodevelopmental Disorders and Director of the Cerebra Centre for Neurodevelopmental Disorders. His main research interests are behavioural, cognitive and emotional disorders in people with severe intellectual disability, genetic syndromes and autism spectrum conditions.

Professor Raymond is a visual perception/cognition specialist with a wide range of interests in how humans use and respond to complex visual information. She conducted the seminal work on the “Attention Blink”, a finding that launched intensive interest in labs around the world on how selective attention operates over time. Her work has included studies visual attention across ...

My research aims to understand the health paradox of adolescence - the years between 12 and 25 are a time of great physical fitness, yet this is the period during which 75% of all mental disorders have their onset. Why should this be the case? Clearly changes in the brain are likely culprits, but how they interact with genetic and environmental factors to produce illness is unclear.

Readers

Reader in Imaging NeuroscienceDirector of the Birmingham University Imaging Centre

Dr Bagshaw's main interest is in developing and applying non-invasive neuroimaging methods to questions in clinical and behavioural neuroscience. Current work in the Multimodal Integration Group (MIG)focuses on using EEG-fMRI to understand the influence of ongoing brain activity on evoked and behavioural responses, and to examine the localisation and functional significance of ...

My research examines children’s and adults’ thinking about time and knowledge. I am interested in how children become able to speculate about events in the past and future and how they handle uncertainty, and how adults’ apparently sophisticated thinking in these areas is often irrational. More information about my research and my lab can be found at www.sarahruthbec ...

Senior Lecturers

Dr Jason Braithwaite is a Senior Lecturer in Cognitive Psychology and Brain Science at the Behavioural Brain Sciences Centre, School of Psychology, University of Birmingham. He heads the Selective Attention & Awareness Laboratory (SAAL) which has been supported with previous funding from the Leverhulme Trust, ESRC, BBSRC, RCUK, The Bial Foundation. He ...

Dr Anke Büttner is a psycholinguist and cognitive psychologist interested in the way people make sense of language. She also has an interest in learning and teaching, in particular in the effects of encouraging students to take ownership of the work and in the processes that take place during mentoring relationships.

Dr Jonathan Catling is a Cognitive Psychologist. His main research interest lies within the field of psycholinguistics, specifically assessing the impact of the ‘Age of Acquisition’ of language on cognitive functions in later life.

Louise specialises in the prevention of interpersonal violence. Her work primarily centres on intimate partner aggression and group and gang related aggression and addresses issues related to aetiology, risk assessment, intervention, primary prevention and policy change. She enjoys an international research profile which positively impacts upon practice, policy and service provision.

Catherine Hamilton-Giachritsis is an HCPC registered Forensic Psychologist and Clinical Psychologist with an interest in child maltreatment and family violence, including risk assessment, impact of early institutionalisation and long-term outcomes (e.g., psychopathology and/or resilience). She also studies vulnerability to online grooming and impact on young people.

Dr Simon Hanslmayr is an expert in the role of brain oscillations for human cognition. His research addresses the question of how brain oscillations mediate long-term memory and attention in the human brain.

Dr. Dietmar Heinke teaches statistics at the School of Psychology. His research focuses on interdisciplinary brain research integrating experimental work in psychology with theoretical/computational modeling work. for more information see his personal webpages.

Andrea Krott is psycholinguist who is interested in language acquisition and brain responses to language processing. Many of her studies, carried out in various languages, have focused on how adults and children understand and produce compound words (e.g. “baby bottle”). Her current research concerns children’s word learning and language-related brain responses (EEG) in ...

My main roles involve teaching, supporting and supervising research on the clinical psychology doctorate, and organising the MRes Clinical Psychology course. I also supervise PhD students using qualitative research methods to explore experiences of psychological distress, recovery, relatedness and caring. My research interests are in these same areas.

I am a behavioural neuroscientist primarily interested in the mechanisms and functions of memory processes. In particular, I currently study the phenomenon of memory reconsolidation, which may have applications in the understanding of and treatment of conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder and drug addiction.

Monica Lloyd joined the University part time on retirement from the National Offender Management Service. She helped to establish the new combined forensic and clinical doctorate training and her specialism is the Psychology of Extremism and Terrorism. She continues to offer consultancy to the Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism in the UK and to the International Centre for Counter ...

Andrew Olson is a neuropsychologist who is interested in cognition and its various forms of breakdown and especially in the organization of language in the brain. He works with patient volunteers with aphasia, children, healthy adults and members of the deaf community.

Andrew Schofield's primary research is on functional aspects of the visual perceptio with an emphasis on textures, surfaces and shape. He also has interests in the effects of ageing on visual perception and the role of cortical hyper-excitability in abnormal visual functioning. He also builds computational models of human vision and designs computer vision algorithms.

Jessica is a chartered psychologist and an HCPC registered forensic psychologist. Her primary areas of research are policing and sexual offending. She is the founder of the international academic-practitioner C-LINK network (Crime Linkage International NetworK, www.crimelinkage.org).

Lecturers

Dr Beierholm is a computational neuroscientist researching issues on theoretical models of information processing at the behavioural level, i.e. how perceptual stimuli and cognitive instructions lead to human decisions and actions.

Dr Di Luca investigates the mechanisms of human perception using psychophysical methods and computational modeling. His research goal is to understand how humans integrate multiple sensory signals and accumulate information over time to generate a percept.

Joint Nottingham and Birmingham Lecturer and Anne McLaren Research Fellow

Dr Mullinger is an expert in simultaneous EEG-fMRI. She focuses on understanding the sources of the EEG artefacts and how to reduce them at source. Using the best EEG-fMRI techniques available she investigates neurovascular coupling to better understand brain function.

My research focuses on sentence level language processing, mostly syntactic and semantic processing. I am especially interested in how these core language processes work, how the workings change throughout the lifespan, and how they are instantiated in the brain.

Dr Stewart is an experimental Social Psychologist with research interests in social cognition, intergroup relations, and ageing. Much of his research focuses on how goals and environments influence automatic and controlled thinking to produce prejudice and influence intergroup relations and decision making.

Dr Maria Wimber is a cognitive neuroscientist interested in human long-term memory. How can the brain retrieve a single past experience, given the huge amount of similar, overlapping events stored in memory? And why do some experiences transform into stable memories while others are forgotten? Maria uses a combination of imaging (fMRI, EEG/MEG) and behavioural methods with the aim to understand ...

Birmingham Fellows

Dr De Brito conducts functional and structural MRI research to 1: examine the neural substrates associated with the development and the persistence of severe antisocial behaviour in children and adults; 2. shed light on the relationship between childhood maltreatment and brain structure and functioning; and 3. Identify structural and functional neural markers of resilience.

Dr Galea is broadly interested in motor control. This ranges from the neural correlates of motor learning to stroke rehabilitation. At present, he is particularly interested in how reward/punishment influences our actions and can be used to alter the speed at which our motor system learns or retains new movements.

Dr Steve Mayhew conducts a lot of simultaneous EEG-fMRI experiments in an effort to better understand the coupling between single-trial variability in electrophysiological and haemodynamic measurements of brain responses, and how interactions between ongoing brain processes and external events are intrinsic to the function of the brain.

Dr Staresina's research focuses on the neural mechanisms underlying episodic memory in humans. He is interested in how different brain mechanisms – in particular subregions of the medial temporal lobe (MTL) - contribute to successful encoding, consolidation and recollection of multiple event details. To address this question, he uses a combination of functional magnetic resonance imaging ...

Research Fellows and Associates

I work in the School of Psychology part-time (.6 FTE) on a five-year NIHR Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship for research into the early signs of challenging behaviour in individuals with intellectual disabilities and genetic syndromes. Outside of this, I continue to work clinically with children and adolescents with mental health problems, learning disabilities and challenging behaviour.

My research interests focus on adolescent mental health. They include the early detection and intervention of mental illness, risks and resilience associated with the development of mental illness, and primary and secondary prevention methods.

Dr Elliott is a Research Fellow in the Sensory Motor Neuroscience (SyMoN) lab. His work investigates how the brain combines information across the senses such that we are able to time and coordinate movements with our surrounding environment. He is currently investigating how groups of people move together in synchrony, occurring in scenarios such as dance, music or simply walking ...

Steven Gillespie is a post-doctoral research fellow working in the field of psychopathic personality and sexual offending. Steven is particularly interested in using experimental methods to investigate the influence of personality traits on cognition and emotion in sexual offenders.

Dr Honisch is broadly interested in human movement timing and coordination. She is affiliated with the Sensory Motor Neuroscience (SyMoN) laband currently works with Dr Kimberly Quinn (Social Psychologist). Her present work investigates theoretical models of interpersonal behavioural synchronisation. Dr Honisch also conducts research on multi-person synchronisation in expert dancers and ...

Jess Kerlin is currently studying visual attention and working memory, with the goal of uncovering the neural mechanisms which underlie these processes. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Psychology under the supervision of Professor Kimron Shapiro and Professor Jane Raymond, utilizing a number of behavioural and neuroimaging techniques to address critical questions in the field.

Dr Ansgar Koene is a postdoctoral research fellow working on human sensory motor control. Based on his multi-disciplinary background in psychology and robotics he also leads the Behaviour Informatics project for facilitating interdisciplinary sharing of information related to human, animal and robot behaviour.

Dr McNab’s main research interest is working memory (WM); the ability to hold information in mind for a short time. She uses fMRI and behavioral studies to investigate the limitations of WM, distraction in WM, how aging affects WM and other cognitive functions, and how WM can be improved with cognitive training.

I am a research fellow at the Cerebra Centre for Neurodevelopmental Disorders, School of Psychology. My main research interests include the study of behavioural phenotypes in neurodevelopmental disorders associated with intellectual disability.

Dr Rosenthal’s research interests focus on basic mechanisms of perceptual dynamics, learning and recovery. Her work is multi disciplinary in its nature. She has a very extensive research experience in studying perception and learning in humans (both healthy and neurologically impaired) and primate, using psychophysical, neurophysiological, neural modeling, engineering and robotic ...

Dr Risa Sawaki is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Visual Experience Lab (directed by Professors Jane Raymond and Kim Shapiro). Her main research goal is to understand cognitive mechanisms of visual attention, memory, value learning, and their interactions. She employs behavioral and neuroscience approaches, including event-related potentials (ERPs) and time-frequency analysis. She ...

Sissy is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Cerebra Centre for Neurodevelopmental Disorders, School of Psychology. Her main research interests include the study of social cognition and social development in individuals with autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders.

Dr Chie Takahashi is a postdoctoral research fellow in Cognitive Psychology and Brain Science at the Behavioural Brain Sciences Centre, and a member of the Selective Attention & Awareness Laboratory (SAAL)directed by Dr Jason Braithwaite. Her current research is to investigate the brain mechanisms of cortical hyperexcitability and the out-of-body experiences in non-clinical ...

Rachel Wright is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow working in the Sensory Motor Neuroscience research group. Her work involves motion capture to analyse aspects of human movement and balance control. Her current research is funded by The Stroke Association and investigates auditory cueing in walking and stepping.

Clinical Lecturers

Ruth is a Clinical Psychologist specialising in work with Children, Young People and Families, particularly in the perinatal and early years period. As an Academic Tutor on the ClinPsyD Programme she oversees the Therapeutic Issues module and has a particular interest in helping trainee clinical psychologists develop as reflective practitioners.

I am a Senior Academic Tutor and Admissions Tutor for the ClinPsyD Programme. I supervise research within the area of health psychology, focusing mainly on coeliac disease, cancer and end of life care. I organise the ClinPsyD health psychology teaching module and support the organisation of the MRes Clinical programme.

I am a Clinical Psychologist. I work in neuropsychological rehabilitation, both in clinical practice and in research. Research interests include family relationships in acquired brain injury/dysfunction, errorless learning, and the coping responses of those with a brain injury.

Honorary Academics

I am a Clinical Psychologist working both at the University of Birmingham and in the NHS. i am an Academic Tutor on the Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) Programmes, and am the Course Lead for the Postgraduate Diploma in High Intensity Psychological Therapies.

I am an applied researcher embedded in Birmingham mental health services. I’m a clinical psychologist by training and act as clinical director to the YouthSpace youth mental health service (www.youthspace.me) and Director of research and Innovation for Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health Foundation Trust.

David Booth investigates the ways in which an individual's life works. His research and teaching centre on the processes in the mind that situate actions and reactions by people, members of other species and, indeed, socially intelligent engineered systems.

Professor Leam A. Craig is a Consultant Forensic and Clinical Psychologist and Partner at Forensic Psychology Practice Ltd. He is Professor (Hon) of Forensic Psychology at the Centre for Forensic and Criminological Psychology, University of Birmingham.

Dr Hermine L. Graham is a Consultant Clinical Psychologist and clinical Lecturer. She has over 20 years experience of working in the NHS and also works in community mental health services in Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health Foundation (NHS) Trust. She has expertise in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) and in the assessment and treatment of a range of mental health and alcohol ...

Dr Jiang’s main research interests are image processing and pattern recognition. Now she works with Dr Andrew Schofield for the project "Extract intrinsic image from a single image". They try to integrate the knowledge of human vision system into computer vision system.

Jane Riddoch is a cognitive neuropsychologist whose research covers visual disorders (agnosia, optic aphasia), disorders of attention (neglect, extinction) and action (apraxia, action disorganisation syndrome) and neuropsychological rehabilitation. She originally trained as a physiotherapist, then took a degree and PhD in Psychology. She has published 150 papers in leading international journals ...

John Rose is a clinical psychologist with a particular interest in working with people who have Intellectual Disabilities and works on the Clin Psy D course at the University. He is also Director of the new Forensic Clinical Doctorate that had its first intake in September 2013.

He also works for St Andrews Health Care and has a strong emphasis on integrating ...

Academic Related staff

Dr Ali Chowdhury is a registered Clinical Scientist and MR Physicist in a joint post with the BUIC and the University Hospitals Birmingham (UHB) NHS Foundation Trust. His work in the area of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and Spectroscopy (MRS) includes providing expert advice in sequence development, quality assurance (QA) and MR safety. In addition, he is active in clinical research ...